We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Chelsea Guevara . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Chelsea below.
Alright, so we’re so thrilled to have Chelsea with us today – welcome and maybe we can jump right into it with a question about one of your qualities that we most admire. How did you develop your work ethic? Where do you think you get it from?
I really thank both of my parents for the work ethic that I have in life. My mother homeschooled me and my 2 brothers until high school, and my father was an immigrant from Ecuador who served in the marine corps for 22 years. My entire life I can remember my parents making the most out of anything we had, we weren’t so poor we went without, but we definitely didn’t have extra money. I have vivid memories of my parents wanting to do something to our yard, fix something wrong with our car, or renovate our home… whether it be flooring, building a dining room table, staining and grouting tile. They were both very handy and I always thought they could do ANYTHING.
If my parents didnt know how to do something and didn’t have the money to pay for it, they taught themselves how to do it and how to do it affordably. This was incredibly resourceful to me and I always looked up to them for this. I thought it was so cool that they could have the desire to learn something new, and could achieve it just by self teaching. This has always motivated me on top of being homeschooled and self-taught I found it really easy to find the resources to teach myself anything I wanted to learn as well.
This trait transferred into my adult and professional life and how I have become a self-taught successful baker and business owner, I did not attend college or school for business or culinary school. Everything I have learned I either asked, looked up on youtube, practiced and learned with my own trial and error. It gives me a lot of pride to teach my self and learn what is right and wrong for me on why own.
I have my parents to thank for this part of myself.
Thanks, so before we move on maybe you can share a bit more about yourself?
I get to use all my creative juices and artistic strength to create beautiful edible pieces of art. I decorate different characters, themes and 3D designs on cookies that are a part of all occasions. This allows me to use my creativity to help others to celebrate important life mile stones and I have the freedom to be myself and work for myself also. I have a commercial kitchen built into my home that enables me to work from home and ship cookies all over the world and participate in lots of local festivals and weekend events to share my product with the community.
I also utilize social media a lot and LIVE stream on Tiktok on a weekly basis while I share my baking and decorating process and also take advantage of the opportunity to build a close relationship with my customers.
I love being able to share what I love with others and getting to be creative daily, think of new flavors or designs to use all while being myself and sharing my life and work with others.
I pride myself on my perfectly- sweet cookies that make people smile and I love sending my cookies all over the world.
I will be an first time instructor at a nation cookie convention this august, called Cookie Con, where thousands of bakers from around the country come to learn from the top decorators. Being a part of this is white an honor and something I am really looking forward to.
There is so much advice out there about all the different skills and qualities folks need to develop in order to succeed in today’s highly competitive environment and often it can feel overwhelming. So, if we had to break it down to just the three that matter most, which three skills or qualities would you focus on?
The most impactful would be the business side, learning what is required for licensing in your state for your specific business is super important and is something I would suggest doing prior to starting your business– I learned a long the way and it was a little bit of a difficult hump to get over. I also really loved having help with a base recipe and something that I could grow from. My aunt is a much more experienced baker than me and she is who taught me everything I knew at the beginning and I will always be very thankful for her and her skills that she shared with me. Having someone to learn from was really helpful.
Being okay with failure, is very important when building a business or a brand. Not everything will work or fall into place right away. Sometimes it will and that’s great, but when it doesn’t you have to be humble enough and open minded to sit back and take an un-biased look at your work or way of doing things and see what can be done differently to make it more successful. What did you do wrong, or what could be done more efficiently. Sometimes you can really like a product or design but if it isn’t successful you have to be ok with going a different route and working around change easily.
Learning your business and about yourself is really exciting.
One of our goals is to help like-minded folks with similar goals connect and so before we go we want to ask if you are looking to partner or collab with others – and if so, what would make the ideal collaborator or partner?
For me collaborating is really big or locally growing my business. Whether it be in person for an event or festival, or via social media to share my cookies and work with another base of customers I wouldn’t have the opportunity of sharing my work with otherwise. For me, its about finding someone who loves my product and wants to share it with others. I love collating with other social media influencers who use TikTok , right now it is my biggest and most active social media account and a lot of my business opportunities come from there.
I also love to work with party planners, community event holders, corporations… Anything that I can do in branded and logo- based work is really something I love to do. When working with corporations I host a lot of team building events with my cookie classes or by sending DIY cookie kits for them to do together and this has been very successful for my business as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.mini-meconfections.com
- Instagram: MiniMeConfections
- Facebook: MiniMeConfections
- Other: TikTok : NotUrAverageMawma
